This method was also
characteristic of the Benthamite reasoning in political theory
generally.
characteristic of the Benthamite reasoning in political theory
generally.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v14
1795.
.
.
.
3 vols.
1910; History of South Africa, from 1795 to 1872.
4th edn. In five vols. 1915.
The above represent Dr Theal's two most ambitious and best-known works, which
also incorporate or supersede, to some extent, earlier monographs on subjects included
in their scope. The following is a selection from his other voluminous writings:
Chronicles of Cape Commanders. . . from 1651 to 1691. . . . Cape Town, 1882 ;
Kaffir Folk-Lore. 2nd edn. 1886; History of the Boers in S. Africa. 1887; The
Portuguese in S. Africa. 1896; Records of the Cape Colony, 1793-1831. 36 vols.
Cape Town, 1897–1905; Records of South-Eastern Africa. 9 vols, 1898–1903 ;
South Africa. (The Story of the Nations. ) 4th edn. 1899; Progress of South Africa
in the Nineteenth Century. (The Nineteenth Century Series. ) 1902; The Beginning
of South African History. Cape Town, 1902; The Yellow and Dark-Skinned
People of Africa, south of the Zambesi. . . . 1910; Willem Adriaan van der Stel, and
other historical sketches. 1913.
Thomas, C. H. Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed. 1900.
Trotter, Mrs A. F. Old Cape Colony. A chronicle of her men and houses, from 1652
to 1806. 1903.
Truscott, S. J. The Witwatersrand Goldfields. 2nd edn. 1902.
Tyler, Josiah. Forty Years among the Zulus. Boston and Chicago, n. d. [1891).
Viljoen, General Ben J. My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War. 1903.
Voigt, J. C. Fifty Years of the History of the Republic in South Africa (1795-1845).
2 vols. 1899.
Wagner, P. A. The Diamond Fields of Southern Africa. Johannesburg, 1914.
Walton, Sir Edgar H. The Inner History of the National Convention of South Africa.
Cape Town, 1912.
Watermeyer, E. B. Three Lectures on the Cape of Good Hope, under the Government
of the Dutch East India Company. Cape Town, 1857 ; Selections from the Writings
of. . . E. B. Watermeyer, with a brief sketch of his life. Cape Town, 1877.
Wessels, J. W. History of the Roman-Dutch Law. Grahamstown, 1908.
Williams, Gardner F. The Diamond Mines of South Africa. Some account of their
Rise and Development. Revised edn. New York, 1905.
## p. 11 (#29) ##############################################
II
Wilmot, Alexander. History of the Zulu War. 1880; The Story of the Expansion of
Southern Africa. London and Cape Town, 1895 ; Monomotapa (Rhodesia). Its
monuments and its history from the most ancient times to the present century.
1896; The History of Our Own Times in South Africa (1872–1898). 3 vols.
London and Cape Town, 1897-9; The History of South Africa. . . . Intended as a
concise manual. . . for general use, etc. 1901; The Life and Times of Sir Richard
Southey. 1904.
Wilmot, Alexander, and Chase, John Centlivres. History of the Colony of the Cape of
Good Hope. From its discovery. . . to 1868. Cape Town, 1869.
Wilson, David Mackay. Behind the Scenes in the Transvaal. 1901.
Wirgman, A. T. The History of the English Church and People in South Africa. 1895.
pp. 590 ff. , chapter xiv. Education,
Adamson, J. W. A Short History of Education. Cambridge, 1919.
## p. 11 (#30) ##############################################
.
1
1
I
## p. 11 (#31) ##############################################
CHAPTER I
PHILOSOPHERS
1. INTRODUCTION
ENGLISH philosophy may be said to have touched low-water
mark in or about the fourth decade of the nineteenth century.
The general public had ceased to be occupied with matters of
speculative thought, and the universities did little or nothing to
keep an interest in them alive. Writing in 1835, John Stuart
Mill complained that philosophy was falling more and more into
disrepute and that great events had ceased to inspire great ideas.
'In the intellectual pursuits which form great minds,' he said, “this country
was formerly pre-eminent. England once stood at the head of European
philosophy. Where stands she now? . . . Out of the narrow bounds of mathe-
matical and physical science, not a vestige of a reading and thinking public
engaged in the investigation of truth as truth, in the prosecution of thought
for the sake of thought. Among few except sectarian religionists-and what
they are we all know-is there any interest in the great problem of man's
nature and life: among still fewer is there any curiosity respecting the nature
and principles of human society, the history or the philosophy of civilization;
nor any belief that, from such inquiries, a single important practical con-
sequence can followi. "
About the same time, or a few years earlier, similar views con-
cerning the low estate of English philosophy had been expressed
by Sir William Hamilton and by Thomas Carlyle? ; and a foreign
observer-Hegel-bad spoken with scorn of the usage of the word
'philosophy’ in the English language.
The writers who made this complaint were foremost in
bringing about a change. Without any approach to philo-
sophical method, Carlyle forced upon public attention ideas
concerning the ultimate meaning and value of life, and, in his
own way, had an influence upon the thought of his time which
may be compared with that of Coleridge in the generation
1 Dissertations and Discussions, vol. 1, pp. 96, 97.
? Cf. Masson, Recent British Philosophy, 3rd edn, pp. 2–5.
E. L. XIV.
CH. I.
1
## p. 11 (#32) ##############################################
29
[CH.
Philosophers
6
immediately preceding. Hamilton and Mill were the leaders of
a marked revival of interest in speculative topics, which rein-
stated philosophy in its due place in the national culture; and
this revival took two different directions connected with their
diverse views and training.
Philosophy, however, had not merely to overcome the public
indifference referred to by John Stuart Mill; it had also to
contend against itself, or, at least, against its dominant form.
The Benthamite creed, which was in the ascendant, was not
favourable to speculative enquiry. "The great problem of man's
nature and life' was regarded as solved in a sense which made
metaphysics and theology alike impossible ; ethical principles
were held to be finally settled by Bentham, so that nothing
remained but their application to different situations; even
political and social theory, the field of the chief triumphs of the
utilitarians, was divorced from history and from every ethical
idea save that of utility ; psychology, however, remained in need
of more adequate treatment than Bentham could give it, and
James Mill supplied the school with a theory of mind which was
in harmony with their other views.
II. JAMES MILL AND OTHERS
The economic doctrines which are characteristic of the utilitarian
school were elaborated by a writer who cannot be regarded as a
member of it and who, indeed, was not interested in philosophy
or even in the larger questions of social theory. This was David
Ricardo, the son of a Dutch Jew who had settled in London and
become a member of the Stock Exchange. Thrown on his own re-
sources, Ricardo soon made a fortune as a stockbroker, retired
from business at an early age and devoted his leisure to economics.
It was not until he had already made his mark as a writer on the
currency that he became acquainted with James Mill, by whose
encouragement, as well as by that of other friends, he was induced,
in 1817, to publish his chief work, Principles of Political Economy
and Taxation. Ricardo received his impetus towards economic
study from Adam Smith. He did not share the latter's breadth of
social outlook or his psychological insight; but he had a masterly
power of abstract reasoning which enabled him to present
economic doctrines in the form of a deductive science. He was
concerned not so much with the nature and causes' as with the
distribution of wealth. This distribution has to be made between
## p. 11 (#33) ##############################################
1] The Economics of Ricardo 3
the classes concerned in the production of wealth, namely, the
landowner, the capitalist, and the labourer; and Ricardo seeks
to show the conditions which determine the share of each. Here,
his theory of rent is fundamental. He did not claim originality
for this theory, which goes by his name, but attributed it to
Malthus's Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent and
Edward West's Essay on the Application of Capital to Land,
both of which appeared in 1815; while his editor, J. R. McCulloch,
discovered the same doctrine in a work by James Anderson,
entitled Enquiry into the Nature of Corn-Laws and published
in 1777. But Ricardo made the doctrine his own.
Rent, he
argued, does not enter into the cost of production; it varies on
different farms according to the fertility of the soil and the
advantages of their situation. But the price of the produce
is the same for all and is fixed by the conditions of production
on the least favourable land which has to be cultivated to meet
the demand ; and this land pays no rent. Rent, therefore, is the
price which the landowner is able to charge for the special
advantages of his land; it is the difference between its return
to a given amount of capital and labour and the similar return
of the least advantageous land which has to be cultivated.
Consequently, it rises as the margin of cultivation spreads to
less fertile soils. Obviously, this doctrine leads to a strong
argument in favour of the free importation of foreign goods,
especially corn. It also breaks with the economic optimism of
Adam Smith, who thought that the interest of the country
gentleman harmonised with that of the mass of the people, for
it shows that the rent of the landowner rises as the increasing
need of the people compels them to have resort to inferior land
for the production of their food.
The value of an article is determined, according to Ricardo,
by the amount of labour required to produce it under the least
favourable conditions; and this value has to be shared between
wages and profits (interest on capital and earnings of business
management not being distinguished in his analysis). Wages
depend on the price of necessaries (that is, chiefly, of food); the
law of population (which he takes over from Malthus) prevents
any further rise. On the other hand, profits depend on high or
low wages. Thus, in the progress of society, the 'natural
tendency of profits is to fall, until 'almost the whole produce
of the country, after paying the labourers, will be the property
of the owners of land and the receivers of tithes and taxes. '
1-2
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4
Philosophers
[CH.
There is, therefore, an opposition of interests within the body
economic; and this opposition is held to be the result of natural
and inevitable law—happily checked, however, at repeated
intervals, by improvements and discoveries. For their effect
Ricardo made allowance. But he took no account of other
than economic motives in human conduct; he may be said to
have invented the fiction of the economic man,' though he did
not use the phrase. And he regarded the economic structure
of society as rigid, though his doctrines often read like satires
upon it, and they became, in the hands both of contemporary
and of later socialist writers, a powerful argument for fundamental
social changes.
Ricardo's method was to proceed from a few very general
propositions about society and human nature, and to draw out
their consequences deductively. That his premisses were one-sided
generalisations, and that his conclusions at best had only hypo-
thetical validity, he did not recognise.
This method was also
characteristic of the Benthamite reasoning in political theory
generally. Thus it was that, in economics, James Mill professed
himself Ricardo's disciple. Mill's Political Economy (1821) re-
duces Ricardo's doctrines to text-book form, and states them with
the concise and confident lucidity which distinguished the author.
For Mill, however, unlike Ricardo, economics was only one
amongst a large number of topics, social and philosophical, which
were open to the same general method of treatment, and which
appealed to his interest. Mill was closely associated with Bentham
-at any rate, from 1808 onwards—and it is difficult to find any
originality in the fundamental doctrines of his creed. At the
same time, he had certain points of superiority. Much inferior
to Bentham in jurisprudence and all that concerned the details
of law, he had, perhaps, a clearer view of political theory and
certainly a wider knowledge of historical conditions. He was,
of course, a whole-hearted adherent of the greatest happiness
principle, and added nothing to its statement; but he was better
equipped for its defence on philosophical grounds and he could
supplement Bentham's deficiencies as a psychologist. But the
necessity of making an income by literary work and, afterwards,
the demands of official employment, as well as, always, the
engrossing interest of public affairs, left him little leisure for
philosophy.
1 See the bibliography by Foxwell, H. S. in appendix 11 (pp. 191—267) of the English
translation of A. Menger's Right to the Whole Produce of Labour (1899).
## p. 11 (#35) ##############################################
1]
James Mill
5
Mill's systematic work in political theory is contained in certain
articles, especially an article on government, contributed to the
supplement of The Encyclopaedia Britannica, edited by Macvey
Napier (1820). In these articles, the author proceeds, methodically,
to determine the best form of political order by deductive
reasoning; and his method was the object of severe criticism
by Macaulay in an article contributed to The Edinburgh Review
in 1829, but not republished in his collected Essays. This article
contained also an attack on the utilitarians generally; and Mill's
rejoinder, so far as he made any, is to be found in A Fragment on
Mackintosh (1835). This consists of 'strictures on some passages
of A Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy which
Sir James Mackintosh had contributed to the seventh edition
of The Encyclopaedia Britannica. Like Mill, Mackintosh was
keenly interested in philosophy, although his career gave him
little time for its pursuit. In this, his only contribution to the
subject, he reviewed the work of the English moralists with
appreciation and insight. It contained criticisms of the utili-
tarians and of their intellectual predecessors which aroused Mill's
hostility, and its occasional lack of precision of thought laid it
open to attack. Mill's 'strictures are limited to a few points
only, and expose the weaknesses of his antagonist's positions in
a manner which would have been more effective if it had been
less violent—although his friends had induced him to moderate its
tone before making it public.
Mill's chief philosophical work was, however, his Analysis of
the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829). In this he laid the
foundation in psychology for the utilitarian superstructure. It
is a compact statement of a theory of mind elaborated on the same
method as that by which any department of nature might be studied.
Mental phenomena are reduced to their simplest elements, and
the association of these into groups and successions is investi-
gated, all association being reduced by him to one law—that
of contiguity. In general, Mill follows: Hume and Hartley—but
Hartley much more than Hume. He disregards, however, the
physiological side of Hartley's theory, so that his own doctrines
are purely psychological. To the psychological school of a later
date, whose leading representatives were John Stuart Mill and
Alexander Bain, his chief positive contribution was the doctrine
of inseparable association; in addition, he marked out afresh
the lines to be followed by a theory which attempts to explain
the facts of consciousness from the association' of ultimate
## p. 11 (#36) ##############################################
6
[CH.
Philosophers
elements called 'sensations'-assumed as themselves not in need
of explanation.
A position intermediate between the associationism of Mill
and the traditional doctrines of the Scottish school was taken
by Thomas Brown, professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh
from 1810 till his death in 1820. By the time he was twenty
years of age Brown had published Observations on the Zoonomia
of Erasmus Darwin (1798), which was recognised as a mature
criticism of that work. Seven years afterwards, in 1805, an
ecclesiastico-academical controversy drew from him a small volume
entitled Observations on the Nature and Tendency of the Doctrine
of Mr Hume concerning the Relation of Cause and Effect, of
which a second enlarged edition was published in 1806 and a
third edition, further enlarged and modified in arrangement and
title, in 1817. In this book, he maintained the view that causation
means simply uniform antecedence, 'to whatever objects, material
or spiritual, the words may be applied'; but he held, also, that
there was an intuitive or instinctive belief that, 'when the previous
circumstances in any case are exactly the same, the resulting
circumstances also will be the same. '
Brown's work on causation certainly showed him to be possessed
of an intellect of penetrating philosophical quality; and it may be
noted that, in his preface to the second edition of it, he already laid
down two principles which distinguished his subsequent writing.
One was that the philosophy of mind' is to be considered as a
science of analysis ; the other was the implicit rejection of the
doctrine of mental faculties as it had figured in previous academic
philosophies. Functions such as memory or comparison, he says,
are merely names for the resemblances among classes of mental
facts. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1820),
published after his death, these principles were applied to the details
of perception and cognition. He made the important distinction
between the muscular sense and touch proper, resolved knowledge
of extension into a succession of muscular sensations, and knowledge
of the external world into a number of constituent sensations, but
held, nevertheless, to the real existence of the physical object on the
ground that it was implied in the intuitive belief in causality. In
these doctrines, and in his analysis of 'relative suggestion,' he made
contributions to psychology which were largely original, although
he was considerably indebted to De Tracy and other predecessors.
The eloquence of his style, as well as the subtlety of his analyses,
## p. 11 (#37) ##############################################
1]
Sir William Hamilton
7
made his lectures famous during his lifetime and, in their printed
form, for many years after his death. They were written hastily,
each lecture to meet the demand of the following day, and they
are too ornate in style for scientific purposes. The shortness
of the author's life, and his own unfortunate preference for his
poetical works over his philosophical, prevented a thorough
revision of what he had written or a consistent and adequate
development of his views.
III. SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AND OTHERS
Hamilton's reputation has not withstood the test of time; but,
in his own day and for a number of years afterwards, his was one
of the two names which stood for the revival of philosophical
thought in Great Britain. His pre-eminence was not altogether
undisputed, however. Even from his younger contemporaries who
did most for Scottish metaphysics, different opinions regarding his
merit may be gathered. Ferrier regarded him, morally and intel-
lectually, as ‘amongst the greatest of the great? ’: whereas Hutchison
Stirling found in him 'a certain vein of disingenuousness that,
cruelly unjust to individuals, has probably caused the retardation of
general British philosophy by, perhaps, a generation? ' The truth
lies somewhere between these extreme views, and it is important
to arrive at a correct estimate of Hamilton's work in order to
understand the course of British philosophy.
Sir William Hamilton was born in 1788, in the old college of
Glasgow, where his father was a professor. He was educated there
and at Oxford, was called to the Scottish bar and, in 1836,
appointed to the chair of logic and metaphysics at Edinburgh.
In 1844 he had a stroke of paralysis, and, although he was able to
continue the work of his professorship until his death in 1856, he
never recovered his physical strength. His published work began
with a number of articles in The Edinburgh Review, republished
in 1852 as Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education
and University Reform. The most important of these were three
articles on the Philosophy of the Unconditioned,' the Philosophy
of Perception' and 'Logic,' which appeared between 1829 and
1833. He afterwards devoted himself to the preparation of an
edition of Reid's Works, which he illustrated with elaborate
appended 'Notes,' chiefly historical in character. This work was
i Ferrier, J. F. , Scottish Philosophy: the old and the new (1856), pp. 15, 16.
* Stirling, J. H. , Sir W. Hamilton : being the Philosophy of Perception (1865), p. vii.
:
:
## p. 11 (#38) ##############################################
8.
[CH.
Philosophers
published in 1846; but the 'Notes' were never completed and are
of the nature of material rather than of literature. After his
death, his Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic were published in
four volumes (1858–60).
Hamilton's positive contributions to philosophy are connected
with the topics of the three articles already named. Indeed, except
as regards logic, these articles contain almost all that is essential
and original in his work. But other points have to be taken into
account in estimating his influence upon philosophical thought.
Since the time of Descartes, continental thought had had little
effect upon English philosophy. Leibniz and even Spinoza were
hardly more than names. Helvétius had influenced Bentham, and
De Tracy Thomas Brown; but Helvétius and De Tracy themselves
worked on lines laid down in England—the lines of Locke. The
doctrines of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, together with the ideas
of the deistical movement, had entered into the European tradition;
but the reaction which they produced, and which began with Kant,
was for long ignored in England. One or two enthusiasts tried to
make Kant known, but their efforts were without result; an article
on Kant by Thomas Brown in the second number of The Edin-
burgh Review (1803) only showed the poverty of the land.
Coleridge, indeed, was a much more important medium; he
brought into English literature ideas which had been derived from
Kant and his successors, and he was recognised by John Stuart
Mill as representing a type of thought, antagonistic to the dominant
Benthamism, which had to be reckoned with. But the teaching
of Coleridge was prophetic rather than scientific, and the philo-
sophical student had to be approached in his own language and by
a master who had the command of traditional learning as well as
fresh doctrines to teach. It was here that Hamilton's cosmopolitan
learning broke in upon British philosophy and lifted it out of the
narrow grooves into which both the Scottish academic teachers
and the English Benthamites had fallen. Hamilton's learning struck
most of his contemporaries as almost superhuman; it was certainly
vast, and, as certainly, without precedent at the time. It made
possible a new orientation in philosophy. The special problems to
which discussion had become restricted were seen as part of a
larger field of enquiry which extended over the whole of western
thought from ancient Greece to modern Germany. Hamilton,
however, had the defects of his qualities. He never obtained easy
mastery of his own learning; he would summon a 'cloud of
witnesses' when a single good argument would have been more to
## p. 11 (#39) ##############################################
6
>
1] Hamilton's Logical Theory 9
the purpose; and his selection of authorities' was often ill-judged:
they were numbered instead of weighed ; and he would spend time
over third-rate schoolmen or equally third-rate modern Germans
which would have been better spent if devoted to a sympathetic
understanding of Kant and Hegel. Nevertheless, Hamilton's work
in this respect is important. He overcame the provincialism of
English thought and he brought it into connection with the
greatest of the new German philosophers. It may have been an
imperfect Kant that he revealed; Fichte, Schelling and Hegel
were brought forward as objects of criticisms only. But the
traditional circle of English thought was broken, and new ideas
were brought within it.
Hamilton came forward as a reconciler of Scottish and German
thought of Reid with Kant. It was only an imperfect synthesis
-
that he worked out, but the enterprise was notable. His logical
work, indeed, stands to some extent apart. He followed Kant in
his strictly formal treatment, and he devoted a large amount of
time, and no little ingenuity, to the elaboration of a modification of
the formal doctrine of the traditional logic. This modified doctrine
made a great stir for many years, and was even hailed as the
greatest logical discovery since the time of Aristotle? It is known
as 'the Quantification of the Predicate. ' Hamilton's own exposi-
tions of it are incomplete and are contained in appendixes to his
Discussions and to his Lectures. The clearest accounts of his
views have to be sought in An Essay on the New Analytic of
Logical Forms (1850), by his pupil, Thomas Spencer Baynes, and
in An Outline of the Laws of Thought (the first edition of which
was published in 1842), by William Thomson, afterwards arch-
bishop of York. But the gist of the matter can be put very
shortly. According to the traditional view, in a judgment or
proposition, an assertion is made about something ; that is to say,
the subject is said to possess or not to possess the quality signified
by the predicate. When made not about an individual thing, but
about a group or class, then the assertion may be meant to apply
to every member of the class or only to some of them ; it is, there-
fore, necessary to indicate this, or to express the quantity of the
subject. The predicate is not similarly quantified. But a quality
is always potentially a class—the class of things which possess that
quality. The most elementary of logical operations implies that
it can be treated as such and assigned a quantity as the subject
of a new proposition. Hamilton's ‘new analytic' depends upon
1 Baynes, T. S. , Essay on the New Analytic (1850), p. 80.
## p. 11 (#40) ##############################################
IO
Philosophers
[ch.
6
the contention that the quantity thus implied should be always
explicitly stated, and consists in following out the changes in
formal procedure which seem to him to result from this being
done. But Hamilton was not thorough enough in the elaboration
of his theory. He did not see that it implied a change from the
predication view' to the class view of the proposition and that
this would lead to a very different classification of propositions
from his, and, in general, to a much more radical revision of logical
forms than he contemplated. Two contemporary mathematicians
-Augustus de Morgan and George Boole—went further than he
did; and the latter's treatise entitled The Laws of Thought (1854)
laid the foundations of the modern logical calculus.
Hamilton's article on the Philosophy of Perception' is both a
defence of Reid and, at the same time, a relentless attack npon
Thomas Brown. It is also an attempt to formulate and justify the
doctrine of natural realism' or natural dualism' in a form less
ambiguous than that in which it had been stated by Reid. 'In
the simplest act of perception,' says Hamilton, 'I am conscious
of myself as the perceiving subject and of an external reality as
the object perceived. ' As regards the latter factor what we
have is said to be an immediate knowledge of the external
reality. This clear view almost disappears, however, in the
process of discussion and elaboration which it underwent in
Hamilton's later thought. In the course of his psychological
analysis, he distinguished sharply and properly between the sub-
jective and the objective factors in the act of cognising external
reality; the former he called sensation proper and the latter
perception proper; and he even formulated a “law' of their inverse
ratio. He elaborated, also, the old distinction of primary and
secondary qualities of matter, to which, more suo, he added an
intermediate class of secundo-primary qualities. As a result of
these distinctions the doctrine of 'immediate knowledge of the
external reality' is transformed. The object of perception proper,
it is said, is either a primary quality or a certain phase of a
secundo-primary. But we do not perceive the primary qualities
of things external to our organism. These are not immediately
known but only inferred; the primary qualities which we do
perceive ‘are perceived as in our organism. ' That is to say, when
,
we perceive a table, we do not perceive the shape or size of the
table; knowledge of these is got by inference; the shape and size
which we perceive are in our own bodies. The existence of an
extra-organic world is apprehended through consciousness of
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а
The Philosophy of the Conditioned II
resistance to our muscular energy, which Hamilton calls a 'quasi-
primary phasis of the secundo-primary' qualities? From this
view it follows that no immediate knowledge of external reality is
given by sight; and yet it would be hard to show that the
'testimony of consciousness,' to which Hamilton constantly and
confidently appeals, makes any such distinction between things
seen and things touched.
The value of Hamilton's philosophy of the conditioned,' as he
called it, is not easy to estimate, chiefly owing to the difficulty of
stating the exact sense in which he held his favourite doctrine of
the relativity of human knowledge. His most striking production
is the first article he published—that on the Philosophy of the
Unconditioned. ' It is a review not directly of Schelling or Hegel,
but of the eclectic system of his French contemporary, Victor
Cousin. The unconditioned, in his use of the term, is a genus of
which the infinite (or unconditionally unlimited) and the absolute
(or unconditionally limited) are the species ; and his contention is
that it is not an object of thought at all, but ‘merely a common
name for what transcends the laws of thought. ' His argument
follows lines similar to those used by Kant in exhibiting the
antinomies of rational cosmology, though it is applied to the con-
clusions of post-Kantian speculation. According to him, there
cannot be any knowledge of that which is without conditions,
whether it is called infinite or absolute; knowledge lies between two
contradictory inconceivables, one of which must be true though
neither can be conceived; all true philosophy is a philosophy of
the conditioned. "To think,' he says, “is to condition. This state-
ment, however, involves two positions which he does not take care
to keep distinct. It implies that we cannot know the infinite or
whole, which in its nature must be without any conditions ; and it
may also be taken as implying that our knowledge of the finite parts
is not a knowledge of them as they truly exist, but only as they are
modified by our way of knowing. This latter position, though very
definitely stated by Hamilton, is not clearly carried out. He follows
Kant by laying chief stress on space and time as the forms under
which we know objects ; but he departs from Kant in holding that
these forms are also modes of things as actually existing. It would
therefore appear that the fact of their being (as Hamilton calls
them) à priori 'forms of thought' does not interfere with the
objective truth of our spatio-temporal knowledge ; it is a know-
ledge, under the forms of space and time, of things which really
1 Reid's Works, ed. Hamilton, Note D*, pp. 881, 882.
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I 2
[CH.
Philosophers
exist in space and time. Hamilton's doctrine of immediate per-
ception necessitates some such view. He saw, moreover, that some
kind of reconciliation was required; but a parenthetical paragraph
in his article on the Philosophy of Perception’exhausts what he
has to say on this important problem. "To obviate misappre-
hension,' he asserts that all that we know is 'those phases of being
which stand in analogy to our faculties of knowledge. ' This vague
phrase may mean little more than that we cannot know what we
are incapable of knowing. Because the nature of a thing is 'in
a
analogy to our faculties' may be the reason why we are able to
know it; it cannot show that we do not know it as it is or in its
actual nature. But Hamilton's mind seemed to work in two
distinct compartments belonging respectively to the philosophy of
perception and to the philosophy of the conditioned. The two
lines of thought seldom met, and when they did meet the result
was sometimes curious. Rerumque ignarus, imagine gaudet is the
taunt he flings at Brown and the representationists; but when he
poses as the philosopher of the conditioned, he takes the same tag
as his own motto—rerumque ignarus, imagine gaudet.
As regards our supposed knowledge of the absolute or of the
infinite, that, he holds, is merely a negative conception. On this
topic he can hardly be said to have set forth anything substantially
new, though his arguments were novel and striking to the English
reader of the day. Nor, even here, on this fundamental point,
can his view be said to be free from ambiguity. His doctrine
seems to lead logically to a form of positivism; he will not even
allow that the moral consciousness or practical reason' has the
significance assigned to it by Kant; but yet he asserts emphatically
that what cannot be known can be and ought to be believed.
What then is belief? By classifying it as a form or 'faculty' of
cognition, Hamilton strikes at the root of his doctrine that thought
excludes the notion of the absolute or infinite. When on the
war-path against the unconditioned, the ‘imbecility' of human
knowledge is asserted to the fullest extent; when religious belief
is in question, the unknown God’ is represented as somehow the
object of consciousness; and sometimes it would even appear as if
his view were simply that knowledge of the highest object which
consciousness can apprehend, cannot, like our knowledge of par-
ticular things, imply a reference to some higher concept.
The theological results of the philosophy of the conditioned
were worked out thoroughly and with effective logic by Henry
## p. 13 (#43) ##############################################
I]
John Stuart Mill
13
Longueville Mansel, an Oxford professor who was dean of St Paul's
for the three years preceding his death in 1871. Mansel was a
scholar of less miscellaneous learning than Hamilton, and his
thinking was less original; but his thought was not obscured by his
learning. In the notes and appendixes to his edition of Aldrich's
Artis Logicæ Rudimenta (1849), and in his Prolegomena Logica
(1851), he defined and defended a formal view of the science
similar to Hamilton's. His Metaphysics (1860), originally con-
tributed to The Encyclopaedia Britannica, is the best connected
exposition of the philosophy that may be called Hamiltonian;
and, in his Philosophy of the Conditioned (1866), the doctrine was
defended against the criticisms of Mill. He was also the author
of a brilliant brochure, in the form of an Aristophanic comedy,
entitled Phrontisterion (republished in Letters, Lectures and
Reviews, 1873), in which academic reformers and German philo-
sophers are satirised. But his wider fame came from his Bampton
lectures, The Limits of Religious Thought (1858). This work is
a Christian apologetic founded on the doctrine of agnosticism
(to use the modern term) which he shared with Hamilton.
Since knowledge of God, in His absolute existence, is self-con-
tradictory, since 'absolute morality' is equally beyond human
knowledge and since our moral conceptions can only be relative
and phenomenal,' he seeks to disallow any criticisms of theological
doctrine which are based upon human conceptions of good and
evil. The indignation with which this doctrine was repudiated by
John Stuart Mill formed one of the most striking, but not one of
the most important, features of his criticism of the philosophy of
Hamilton.
IV. JOHN STUART MILL AND OTHERS
John Stuart Mill is, on the whole, the most interesting and
characteristic figure in English philosophy in the nineteenth
century. He was successively the hope and the leader, sometimes,
also, the despair, of the school of thought which was regarded as
representative of English traditions. He was born in London on
20 May 1806, and was the eldest son of James Mill. He was
educated entirely by his father and was deliberately shielded from
association with other boys of his age. From his earliest years he
was subjected to a rigid system of intellectual discipline. As a
result of this system, knowledge of what are considered the higher
branches of education was acquired by him in childhood, and he
## p. 14 (#44) ##############################################
14
[ch.
Philosophers
started on his career, according to his own account, with an advan-
tage of a quarter of a century over his contemporaries. This
is probably an overstatement of a very remarkable intellectual
precocity; and John Mill recognised, in later life, that his father's
system had the fault of appealing to the intellect only and that
the culture of his practical and emotional life had been neglected,
while his physical health was probably undermined by the strenu-
ous labour exacted from him. James Mill's method seems to
have been designed to make his son's mind a first-rate thinking
machine, so that the boy might become a prophet of the utilitarian
gospel. In this he succeeded. But the interest—one may almost
say, the tragedy—of the son’s life arose from the fact that he
possessed a much finer and subtler nature than his father's—a
mind which could not be entirely satisfied by the hereditary creed.
He remained more or less orthodox, according to the standards of
his school ; but he welcomed light from other quarters, and there
were times when Grote and others feared that he might become
a castaway. 'A new mystic' was Carlyle's judgment upon some
of his early articles. Mill never became a mystic; but he kept an
open mind, and he saw elements of truth in ideas in which the
stricter utilitarians could see nothing at all.
He had no doubts at the outset of his career. On reading
Bentham (this was when he was fifteen or sixteen) the feeling
rushed upon him that all previous moralists were superseded. '
The principle of utility, he says, understood and applied as it was
by Bentham,
gave unity to my conception of things. I now had opinions; a creed, a
doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion;
the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward
purpose of a life.
Soon afterwards he formed a small ‘Utilitarian Society,' and, for
some few years, he was one of 'a little knot of young men who
adopted his father's philosophical and political views 'with youth-
ful fanaticism. ' A position under his father in the India office
had secured him against the misfortune of having to depend on
literary work for his livelihood; and he found that office-work left
him ample leisure for the pursuit of his wider interests.
He was already coming to be looked upon as a leader of
thought when, in his twenty-first year, the mental crisis occurred
which is described in his Autobiography. This crisis was a result
of the severe strain, physical and mental, to which he had been
subjected from his earliest years. He was in a dull state of
6
## p. 15 (#45) ##############################################
1]
Mill's Early Writings
15
nerves'; the objects in life for which he had been trained and for
which he had worked lost their charm; he had ‘no delight in
virtue, or the general good, but also just as little in anything
else'; a constant habit of analysis had dried up the fountains of
feeling within him.
4th edn. In five vols. 1915.
The above represent Dr Theal's two most ambitious and best-known works, which
also incorporate or supersede, to some extent, earlier monographs on subjects included
in their scope. The following is a selection from his other voluminous writings:
Chronicles of Cape Commanders. . . from 1651 to 1691. . . . Cape Town, 1882 ;
Kaffir Folk-Lore. 2nd edn. 1886; History of the Boers in S. Africa. 1887; The
Portuguese in S. Africa. 1896; Records of the Cape Colony, 1793-1831. 36 vols.
Cape Town, 1897–1905; Records of South-Eastern Africa. 9 vols, 1898–1903 ;
South Africa. (The Story of the Nations. ) 4th edn. 1899; Progress of South Africa
in the Nineteenth Century. (The Nineteenth Century Series. ) 1902; The Beginning
of South African History. Cape Town, 1902; The Yellow and Dark-Skinned
People of Africa, south of the Zambesi. . . . 1910; Willem Adriaan van der Stel, and
other historical sketches. 1913.
Thomas, C. H. Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed. 1900.
Trotter, Mrs A. F. Old Cape Colony. A chronicle of her men and houses, from 1652
to 1806. 1903.
Truscott, S. J. The Witwatersrand Goldfields. 2nd edn. 1902.
Tyler, Josiah. Forty Years among the Zulus. Boston and Chicago, n. d. [1891).
Viljoen, General Ben J. My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War. 1903.
Voigt, J. C. Fifty Years of the History of the Republic in South Africa (1795-1845).
2 vols. 1899.
Wagner, P. A. The Diamond Fields of Southern Africa. Johannesburg, 1914.
Walton, Sir Edgar H. The Inner History of the National Convention of South Africa.
Cape Town, 1912.
Watermeyer, E. B. Three Lectures on the Cape of Good Hope, under the Government
of the Dutch East India Company. Cape Town, 1857 ; Selections from the Writings
of. . . E. B. Watermeyer, with a brief sketch of his life. Cape Town, 1877.
Wessels, J. W. History of the Roman-Dutch Law. Grahamstown, 1908.
Williams, Gardner F. The Diamond Mines of South Africa. Some account of their
Rise and Development. Revised edn. New York, 1905.
## p. 11 (#29) ##############################################
II
Wilmot, Alexander. History of the Zulu War. 1880; The Story of the Expansion of
Southern Africa. London and Cape Town, 1895 ; Monomotapa (Rhodesia). Its
monuments and its history from the most ancient times to the present century.
1896; The History of Our Own Times in South Africa (1872–1898). 3 vols.
London and Cape Town, 1897-9; The History of South Africa. . . . Intended as a
concise manual. . . for general use, etc. 1901; The Life and Times of Sir Richard
Southey. 1904.
Wilmot, Alexander, and Chase, John Centlivres. History of the Colony of the Cape of
Good Hope. From its discovery. . . to 1868. Cape Town, 1869.
Wilson, David Mackay. Behind the Scenes in the Transvaal. 1901.
Wirgman, A. T. The History of the English Church and People in South Africa. 1895.
pp. 590 ff. , chapter xiv. Education,
Adamson, J. W. A Short History of Education. Cambridge, 1919.
## p. 11 (#30) ##############################################
.
1
1
I
## p. 11 (#31) ##############################################
CHAPTER I
PHILOSOPHERS
1. INTRODUCTION
ENGLISH philosophy may be said to have touched low-water
mark in or about the fourth decade of the nineteenth century.
The general public had ceased to be occupied with matters of
speculative thought, and the universities did little or nothing to
keep an interest in them alive. Writing in 1835, John Stuart
Mill complained that philosophy was falling more and more into
disrepute and that great events had ceased to inspire great ideas.
'In the intellectual pursuits which form great minds,' he said, “this country
was formerly pre-eminent. England once stood at the head of European
philosophy. Where stands she now? . . . Out of the narrow bounds of mathe-
matical and physical science, not a vestige of a reading and thinking public
engaged in the investigation of truth as truth, in the prosecution of thought
for the sake of thought. Among few except sectarian religionists-and what
they are we all know-is there any interest in the great problem of man's
nature and life: among still fewer is there any curiosity respecting the nature
and principles of human society, the history or the philosophy of civilization;
nor any belief that, from such inquiries, a single important practical con-
sequence can followi. "
About the same time, or a few years earlier, similar views con-
cerning the low estate of English philosophy had been expressed
by Sir William Hamilton and by Thomas Carlyle? ; and a foreign
observer-Hegel-bad spoken with scorn of the usage of the word
'philosophy’ in the English language.
The writers who made this complaint were foremost in
bringing about a change. Without any approach to philo-
sophical method, Carlyle forced upon public attention ideas
concerning the ultimate meaning and value of life, and, in his
own way, had an influence upon the thought of his time which
may be compared with that of Coleridge in the generation
1 Dissertations and Discussions, vol. 1, pp. 96, 97.
? Cf. Masson, Recent British Philosophy, 3rd edn, pp. 2–5.
E. L. XIV.
CH. I.
1
## p. 11 (#32) ##############################################
29
[CH.
Philosophers
6
immediately preceding. Hamilton and Mill were the leaders of
a marked revival of interest in speculative topics, which rein-
stated philosophy in its due place in the national culture; and
this revival took two different directions connected with their
diverse views and training.
Philosophy, however, had not merely to overcome the public
indifference referred to by John Stuart Mill; it had also to
contend against itself, or, at least, against its dominant form.
The Benthamite creed, which was in the ascendant, was not
favourable to speculative enquiry. "The great problem of man's
nature and life' was regarded as solved in a sense which made
metaphysics and theology alike impossible ; ethical principles
were held to be finally settled by Bentham, so that nothing
remained but their application to different situations; even
political and social theory, the field of the chief triumphs of the
utilitarians, was divorced from history and from every ethical
idea save that of utility ; psychology, however, remained in need
of more adequate treatment than Bentham could give it, and
James Mill supplied the school with a theory of mind which was
in harmony with their other views.
II. JAMES MILL AND OTHERS
The economic doctrines which are characteristic of the utilitarian
school were elaborated by a writer who cannot be regarded as a
member of it and who, indeed, was not interested in philosophy
or even in the larger questions of social theory. This was David
Ricardo, the son of a Dutch Jew who had settled in London and
become a member of the Stock Exchange. Thrown on his own re-
sources, Ricardo soon made a fortune as a stockbroker, retired
from business at an early age and devoted his leisure to economics.
It was not until he had already made his mark as a writer on the
currency that he became acquainted with James Mill, by whose
encouragement, as well as by that of other friends, he was induced,
in 1817, to publish his chief work, Principles of Political Economy
and Taxation. Ricardo received his impetus towards economic
study from Adam Smith. He did not share the latter's breadth of
social outlook or his psychological insight; but he had a masterly
power of abstract reasoning which enabled him to present
economic doctrines in the form of a deductive science. He was
concerned not so much with the nature and causes' as with the
distribution of wealth. This distribution has to be made between
## p. 11 (#33) ##############################################
1] The Economics of Ricardo 3
the classes concerned in the production of wealth, namely, the
landowner, the capitalist, and the labourer; and Ricardo seeks
to show the conditions which determine the share of each. Here,
his theory of rent is fundamental. He did not claim originality
for this theory, which goes by his name, but attributed it to
Malthus's Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent and
Edward West's Essay on the Application of Capital to Land,
both of which appeared in 1815; while his editor, J. R. McCulloch,
discovered the same doctrine in a work by James Anderson,
entitled Enquiry into the Nature of Corn-Laws and published
in 1777. But Ricardo made the doctrine his own.
Rent, he
argued, does not enter into the cost of production; it varies on
different farms according to the fertility of the soil and the
advantages of their situation. But the price of the produce
is the same for all and is fixed by the conditions of production
on the least favourable land which has to be cultivated to meet
the demand ; and this land pays no rent. Rent, therefore, is the
price which the landowner is able to charge for the special
advantages of his land; it is the difference between its return
to a given amount of capital and labour and the similar return
of the least advantageous land which has to be cultivated.
Consequently, it rises as the margin of cultivation spreads to
less fertile soils. Obviously, this doctrine leads to a strong
argument in favour of the free importation of foreign goods,
especially corn. It also breaks with the economic optimism of
Adam Smith, who thought that the interest of the country
gentleman harmonised with that of the mass of the people, for
it shows that the rent of the landowner rises as the increasing
need of the people compels them to have resort to inferior land
for the production of their food.
The value of an article is determined, according to Ricardo,
by the amount of labour required to produce it under the least
favourable conditions; and this value has to be shared between
wages and profits (interest on capital and earnings of business
management not being distinguished in his analysis). Wages
depend on the price of necessaries (that is, chiefly, of food); the
law of population (which he takes over from Malthus) prevents
any further rise. On the other hand, profits depend on high or
low wages. Thus, in the progress of society, the 'natural
tendency of profits is to fall, until 'almost the whole produce
of the country, after paying the labourers, will be the property
of the owners of land and the receivers of tithes and taxes. '
1-2
## p. 11 (#34) ##############################################
4
Philosophers
[CH.
There is, therefore, an opposition of interests within the body
economic; and this opposition is held to be the result of natural
and inevitable law—happily checked, however, at repeated
intervals, by improvements and discoveries. For their effect
Ricardo made allowance. But he took no account of other
than economic motives in human conduct; he may be said to
have invented the fiction of the economic man,' though he did
not use the phrase. And he regarded the economic structure
of society as rigid, though his doctrines often read like satires
upon it, and they became, in the hands both of contemporary
and of later socialist writers, a powerful argument for fundamental
social changes.
Ricardo's method was to proceed from a few very general
propositions about society and human nature, and to draw out
their consequences deductively. That his premisses were one-sided
generalisations, and that his conclusions at best had only hypo-
thetical validity, he did not recognise.
This method was also
characteristic of the Benthamite reasoning in political theory
generally. Thus it was that, in economics, James Mill professed
himself Ricardo's disciple. Mill's Political Economy (1821) re-
duces Ricardo's doctrines to text-book form, and states them with
the concise and confident lucidity which distinguished the author.
For Mill, however, unlike Ricardo, economics was only one
amongst a large number of topics, social and philosophical, which
were open to the same general method of treatment, and which
appealed to his interest. Mill was closely associated with Bentham
-at any rate, from 1808 onwards—and it is difficult to find any
originality in the fundamental doctrines of his creed. At the
same time, he had certain points of superiority. Much inferior
to Bentham in jurisprudence and all that concerned the details
of law, he had, perhaps, a clearer view of political theory and
certainly a wider knowledge of historical conditions. He was,
of course, a whole-hearted adherent of the greatest happiness
principle, and added nothing to its statement; but he was better
equipped for its defence on philosophical grounds and he could
supplement Bentham's deficiencies as a psychologist. But the
necessity of making an income by literary work and, afterwards,
the demands of official employment, as well as, always, the
engrossing interest of public affairs, left him little leisure for
philosophy.
1 See the bibliography by Foxwell, H. S. in appendix 11 (pp. 191—267) of the English
translation of A. Menger's Right to the Whole Produce of Labour (1899).
## p. 11 (#35) ##############################################
1]
James Mill
5
Mill's systematic work in political theory is contained in certain
articles, especially an article on government, contributed to the
supplement of The Encyclopaedia Britannica, edited by Macvey
Napier (1820). In these articles, the author proceeds, methodically,
to determine the best form of political order by deductive
reasoning; and his method was the object of severe criticism
by Macaulay in an article contributed to The Edinburgh Review
in 1829, but not republished in his collected Essays. This article
contained also an attack on the utilitarians generally; and Mill's
rejoinder, so far as he made any, is to be found in A Fragment on
Mackintosh (1835). This consists of 'strictures on some passages
of A Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy which
Sir James Mackintosh had contributed to the seventh edition
of The Encyclopaedia Britannica. Like Mill, Mackintosh was
keenly interested in philosophy, although his career gave him
little time for its pursuit. In this, his only contribution to the
subject, he reviewed the work of the English moralists with
appreciation and insight. It contained criticisms of the utili-
tarians and of their intellectual predecessors which aroused Mill's
hostility, and its occasional lack of precision of thought laid it
open to attack. Mill's 'strictures are limited to a few points
only, and expose the weaknesses of his antagonist's positions in
a manner which would have been more effective if it had been
less violent—although his friends had induced him to moderate its
tone before making it public.
Mill's chief philosophical work was, however, his Analysis of
the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829). In this he laid the
foundation in psychology for the utilitarian superstructure. It
is a compact statement of a theory of mind elaborated on the same
method as that by which any department of nature might be studied.
Mental phenomena are reduced to their simplest elements, and
the association of these into groups and successions is investi-
gated, all association being reduced by him to one law—that
of contiguity. In general, Mill follows: Hume and Hartley—but
Hartley much more than Hume. He disregards, however, the
physiological side of Hartley's theory, so that his own doctrines
are purely psychological. To the psychological school of a later
date, whose leading representatives were John Stuart Mill and
Alexander Bain, his chief positive contribution was the doctrine
of inseparable association; in addition, he marked out afresh
the lines to be followed by a theory which attempts to explain
the facts of consciousness from the association' of ultimate
## p. 11 (#36) ##############################################
6
[CH.
Philosophers
elements called 'sensations'-assumed as themselves not in need
of explanation.
A position intermediate between the associationism of Mill
and the traditional doctrines of the Scottish school was taken
by Thomas Brown, professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh
from 1810 till his death in 1820. By the time he was twenty
years of age Brown had published Observations on the Zoonomia
of Erasmus Darwin (1798), which was recognised as a mature
criticism of that work. Seven years afterwards, in 1805, an
ecclesiastico-academical controversy drew from him a small volume
entitled Observations on the Nature and Tendency of the Doctrine
of Mr Hume concerning the Relation of Cause and Effect, of
which a second enlarged edition was published in 1806 and a
third edition, further enlarged and modified in arrangement and
title, in 1817. In this book, he maintained the view that causation
means simply uniform antecedence, 'to whatever objects, material
or spiritual, the words may be applied'; but he held, also, that
there was an intuitive or instinctive belief that, 'when the previous
circumstances in any case are exactly the same, the resulting
circumstances also will be the same. '
Brown's work on causation certainly showed him to be possessed
of an intellect of penetrating philosophical quality; and it may be
noted that, in his preface to the second edition of it, he already laid
down two principles which distinguished his subsequent writing.
One was that the philosophy of mind' is to be considered as a
science of analysis ; the other was the implicit rejection of the
doctrine of mental faculties as it had figured in previous academic
philosophies. Functions such as memory or comparison, he says,
are merely names for the resemblances among classes of mental
facts. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1820),
published after his death, these principles were applied to the details
of perception and cognition. He made the important distinction
between the muscular sense and touch proper, resolved knowledge
of extension into a succession of muscular sensations, and knowledge
of the external world into a number of constituent sensations, but
held, nevertheless, to the real existence of the physical object on the
ground that it was implied in the intuitive belief in causality. In
these doctrines, and in his analysis of 'relative suggestion,' he made
contributions to psychology which were largely original, although
he was considerably indebted to De Tracy and other predecessors.
The eloquence of his style, as well as the subtlety of his analyses,
## p. 11 (#37) ##############################################
1]
Sir William Hamilton
7
made his lectures famous during his lifetime and, in their printed
form, for many years after his death. They were written hastily,
each lecture to meet the demand of the following day, and they
are too ornate in style for scientific purposes. The shortness
of the author's life, and his own unfortunate preference for his
poetical works over his philosophical, prevented a thorough
revision of what he had written or a consistent and adequate
development of his views.
III. SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AND OTHERS
Hamilton's reputation has not withstood the test of time; but,
in his own day and for a number of years afterwards, his was one
of the two names which stood for the revival of philosophical
thought in Great Britain. His pre-eminence was not altogether
undisputed, however. Even from his younger contemporaries who
did most for Scottish metaphysics, different opinions regarding his
merit may be gathered. Ferrier regarded him, morally and intel-
lectually, as ‘amongst the greatest of the great? ’: whereas Hutchison
Stirling found in him 'a certain vein of disingenuousness that,
cruelly unjust to individuals, has probably caused the retardation of
general British philosophy by, perhaps, a generation? ' The truth
lies somewhere between these extreme views, and it is important
to arrive at a correct estimate of Hamilton's work in order to
understand the course of British philosophy.
Sir William Hamilton was born in 1788, in the old college of
Glasgow, where his father was a professor. He was educated there
and at Oxford, was called to the Scottish bar and, in 1836,
appointed to the chair of logic and metaphysics at Edinburgh.
In 1844 he had a stroke of paralysis, and, although he was able to
continue the work of his professorship until his death in 1856, he
never recovered his physical strength. His published work began
with a number of articles in The Edinburgh Review, republished
in 1852 as Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education
and University Reform. The most important of these were three
articles on the Philosophy of the Unconditioned,' the Philosophy
of Perception' and 'Logic,' which appeared between 1829 and
1833. He afterwards devoted himself to the preparation of an
edition of Reid's Works, which he illustrated with elaborate
appended 'Notes,' chiefly historical in character. This work was
i Ferrier, J. F. , Scottish Philosophy: the old and the new (1856), pp. 15, 16.
* Stirling, J. H. , Sir W. Hamilton : being the Philosophy of Perception (1865), p. vii.
:
:
## p. 11 (#38) ##############################################
8.
[CH.
Philosophers
published in 1846; but the 'Notes' were never completed and are
of the nature of material rather than of literature. After his
death, his Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic were published in
four volumes (1858–60).
Hamilton's positive contributions to philosophy are connected
with the topics of the three articles already named. Indeed, except
as regards logic, these articles contain almost all that is essential
and original in his work. But other points have to be taken into
account in estimating his influence upon philosophical thought.
Since the time of Descartes, continental thought had had little
effect upon English philosophy. Leibniz and even Spinoza were
hardly more than names. Helvétius had influenced Bentham, and
De Tracy Thomas Brown; but Helvétius and De Tracy themselves
worked on lines laid down in England—the lines of Locke. The
doctrines of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, together with the ideas
of the deistical movement, had entered into the European tradition;
but the reaction which they produced, and which began with Kant,
was for long ignored in England. One or two enthusiasts tried to
make Kant known, but their efforts were without result; an article
on Kant by Thomas Brown in the second number of The Edin-
burgh Review (1803) only showed the poverty of the land.
Coleridge, indeed, was a much more important medium; he
brought into English literature ideas which had been derived from
Kant and his successors, and he was recognised by John Stuart
Mill as representing a type of thought, antagonistic to the dominant
Benthamism, which had to be reckoned with. But the teaching
of Coleridge was prophetic rather than scientific, and the philo-
sophical student had to be approached in his own language and by
a master who had the command of traditional learning as well as
fresh doctrines to teach. It was here that Hamilton's cosmopolitan
learning broke in upon British philosophy and lifted it out of the
narrow grooves into which both the Scottish academic teachers
and the English Benthamites had fallen. Hamilton's learning struck
most of his contemporaries as almost superhuman; it was certainly
vast, and, as certainly, without precedent at the time. It made
possible a new orientation in philosophy. The special problems to
which discussion had become restricted were seen as part of a
larger field of enquiry which extended over the whole of western
thought from ancient Greece to modern Germany. Hamilton,
however, had the defects of his qualities. He never obtained easy
mastery of his own learning; he would summon a 'cloud of
witnesses' when a single good argument would have been more to
## p. 11 (#39) ##############################################
6
>
1] Hamilton's Logical Theory 9
the purpose; and his selection of authorities' was often ill-judged:
they were numbered instead of weighed ; and he would spend time
over third-rate schoolmen or equally third-rate modern Germans
which would have been better spent if devoted to a sympathetic
understanding of Kant and Hegel. Nevertheless, Hamilton's work
in this respect is important. He overcame the provincialism of
English thought and he brought it into connection with the
greatest of the new German philosophers. It may have been an
imperfect Kant that he revealed; Fichte, Schelling and Hegel
were brought forward as objects of criticisms only. But the
traditional circle of English thought was broken, and new ideas
were brought within it.
Hamilton came forward as a reconciler of Scottish and German
thought of Reid with Kant. It was only an imperfect synthesis
-
that he worked out, but the enterprise was notable. His logical
work, indeed, stands to some extent apart. He followed Kant in
his strictly formal treatment, and he devoted a large amount of
time, and no little ingenuity, to the elaboration of a modification of
the formal doctrine of the traditional logic. This modified doctrine
made a great stir for many years, and was even hailed as the
greatest logical discovery since the time of Aristotle? It is known
as 'the Quantification of the Predicate. ' Hamilton's own exposi-
tions of it are incomplete and are contained in appendixes to his
Discussions and to his Lectures. The clearest accounts of his
views have to be sought in An Essay on the New Analytic of
Logical Forms (1850), by his pupil, Thomas Spencer Baynes, and
in An Outline of the Laws of Thought (the first edition of which
was published in 1842), by William Thomson, afterwards arch-
bishop of York. But the gist of the matter can be put very
shortly. According to the traditional view, in a judgment or
proposition, an assertion is made about something ; that is to say,
the subject is said to possess or not to possess the quality signified
by the predicate. When made not about an individual thing, but
about a group or class, then the assertion may be meant to apply
to every member of the class or only to some of them ; it is, there-
fore, necessary to indicate this, or to express the quantity of the
subject. The predicate is not similarly quantified. But a quality
is always potentially a class—the class of things which possess that
quality. The most elementary of logical operations implies that
it can be treated as such and assigned a quantity as the subject
of a new proposition. Hamilton's ‘new analytic' depends upon
1 Baynes, T. S. , Essay on the New Analytic (1850), p. 80.
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Philosophers
[ch.
6
the contention that the quantity thus implied should be always
explicitly stated, and consists in following out the changes in
formal procedure which seem to him to result from this being
done. But Hamilton was not thorough enough in the elaboration
of his theory. He did not see that it implied a change from the
predication view' to the class view of the proposition and that
this would lead to a very different classification of propositions
from his, and, in general, to a much more radical revision of logical
forms than he contemplated. Two contemporary mathematicians
-Augustus de Morgan and George Boole—went further than he
did; and the latter's treatise entitled The Laws of Thought (1854)
laid the foundations of the modern logical calculus.
Hamilton's article on the Philosophy of Perception' is both a
defence of Reid and, at the same time, a relentless attack npon
Thomas Brown. It is also an attempt to formulate and justify the
doctrine of natural realism' or natural dualism' in a form less
ambiguous than that in which it had been stated by Reid. 'In
the simplest act of perception,' says Hamilton, 'I am conscious
of myself as the perceiving subject and of an external reality as
the object perceived. ' As regards the latter factor what we
have is said to be an immediate knowledge of the external
reality. This clear view almost disappears, however, in the
process of discussion and elaboration which it underwent in
Hamilton's later thought. In the course of his psychological
analysis, he distinguished sharply and properly between the sub-
jective and the objective factors in the act of cognising external
reality; the former he called sensation proper and the latter
perception proper; and he even formulated a “law' of their inverse
ratio. He elaborated, also, the old distinction of primary and
secondary qualities of matter, to which, more suo, he added an
intermediate class of secundo-primary qualities. As a result of
these distinctions the doctrine of 'immediate knowledge of the
external reality' is transformed. The object of perception proper,
it is said, is either a primary quality or a certain phase of a
secundo-primary. But we do not perceive the primary qualities
of things external to our organism. These are not immediately
known but only inferred; the primary qualities which we do
perceive ‘are perceived as in our organism. ' That is to say, when
,
we perceive a table, we do not perceive the shape or size of the
table; knowledge of these is got by inference; the shape and size
which we perceive are in our own bodies. The existence of an
extra-organic world is apprehended through consciousness of
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The Philosophy of the Conditioned II
resistance to our muscular energy, which Hamilton calls a 'quasi-
primary phasis of the secundo-primary' qualities? From this
view it follows that no immediate knowledge of external reality is
given by sight; and yet it would be hard to show that the
'testimony of consciousness,' to which Hamilton constantly and
confidently appeals, makes any such distinction between things
seen and things touched.
The value of Hamilton's philosophy of the conditioned,' as he
called it, is not easy to estimate, chiefly owing to the difficulty of
stating the exact sense in which he held his favourite doctrine of
the relativity of human knowledge. His most striking production
is the first article he published—that on the Philosophy of the
Unconditioned. ' It is a review not directly of Schelling or Hegel,
but of the eclectic system of his French contemporary, Victor
Cousin. The unconditioned, in his use of the term, is a genus of
which the infinite (or unconditionally unlimited) and the absolute
(or unconditionally limited) are the species ; and his contention is
that it is not an object of thought at all, but ‘merely a common
name for what transcends the laws of thought. ' His argument
follows lines similar to those used by Kant in exhibiting the
antinomies of rational cosmology, though it is applied to the con-
clusions of post-Kantian speculation. According to him, there
cannot be any knowledge of that which is without conditions,
whether it is called infinite or absolute; knowledge lies between two
contradictory inconceivables, one of which must be true though
neither can be conceived; all true philosophy is a philosophy of
the conditioned. "To think,' he says, “is to condition. This state-
ment, however, involves two positions which he does not take care
to keep distinct. It implies that we cannot know the infinite or
whole, which in its nature must be without any conditions ; and it
may also be taken as implying that our knowledge of the finite parts
is not a knowledge of them as they truly exist, but only as they are
modified by our way of knowing. This latter position, though very
definitely stated by Hamilton, is not clearly carried out. He follows
Kant by laying chief stress on space and time as the forms under
which we know objects ; but he departs from Kant in holding that
these forms are also modes of things as actually existing. It would
therefore appear that the fact of their being (as Hamilton calls
them) à priori 'forms of thought' does not interfere with the
objective truth of our spatio-temporal knowledge ; it is a know-
ledge, under the forms of space and time, of things which really
1 Reid's Works, ed. Hamilton, Note D*, pp. 881, 882.
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[CH.
Philosophers
exist in space and time. Hamilton's doctrine of immediate per-
ception necessitates some such view. He saw, moreover, that some
kind of reconciliation was required; but a parenthetical paragraph
in his article on the Philosophy of Perception’exhausts what he
has to say on this important problem. "To obviate misappre-
hension,' he asserts that all that we know is 'those phases of being
which stand in analogy to our faculties of knowledge. ' This vague
phrase may mean little more than that we cannot know what we
are incapable of knowing. Because the nature of a thing is 'in
a
analogy to our faculties' may be the reason why we are able to
know it; it cannot show that we do not know it as it is or in its
actual nature. But Hamilton's mind seemed to work in two
distinct compartments belonging respectively to the philosophy of
perception and to the philosophy of the conditioned. The two
lines of thought seldom met, and when they did meet the result
was sometimes curious. Rerumque ignarus, imagine gaudet is the
taunt he flings at Brown and the representationists; but when he
poses as the philosopher of the conditioned, he takes the same tag
as his own motto—rerumque ignarus, imagine gaudet.
As regards our supposed knowledge of the absolute or of the
infinite, that, he holds, is merely a negative conception. On this
topic he can hardly be said to have set forth anything substantially
new, though his arguments were novel and striking to the English
reader of the day. Nor, even here, on this fundamental point,
can his view be said to be free from ambiguity. His doctrine
seems to lead logically to a form of positivism; he will not even
allow that the moral consciousness or practical reason' has the
significance assigned to it by Kant; but yet he asserts emphatically
that what cannot be known can be and ought to be believed.
What then is belief? By classifying it as a form or 'faculty' of
cognition, Hamilton strikes at the root of his doctrine that thought
excludes the notion of the absolute or infinite. When on the
war-path against the unconditioned, the ‘imbecility' of human
knowledge is asserted to the fullest extent; when religious belief
is in question, the unknown God’ is represented as somehow the
object of consciousness; and sometimes it would even appear as if
his view were simply that knowledge of the highest object which
consciousness can apprehend, cannot, like our knowledge of par-
ticular things, imply a reference to some higher concept.
The theological results of the philosophy of the conditioned
were worked out thoroughly and with effective logic by Henry
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John Stuart Mill
13
Longueville Mansel, an Oxford professor who was dean of St Paul's
for the three years preceding his death in 1871. Mansel was a
scholar of less miscellaneous learning than Hamilton, and his
thinking was less original; but his thought was not obscured by his
learning. In the notes and appendixes to his edition of Aldrich's
Artis Logicæ Rudimenta (1849), and in his Prolegomena Logica
(1851), he defined and defended a formal view of the science
similar to Hamilton's. His Metaphysics (1860), originally con-
tributed to The Encyclopaedia Britannica, is the best connected
exposition of the philosophy that may be called Hamiltonian;
and, in his Philosophy of the Conditioned (1866), the doctrine was
defended against the criticisms of Mill. He was also the author
of a brilliant brochure, in the form of an Aristophanic comedy,
entitled Phrontisterion (republished in Letters, Lectures and
Reviews, 1873), in which academic reformers and German philo-
sophers are satirised. But his wider fame came from his Bampton
lectures, The Limits of Religious Thought (1858). This work is
a Christian apologetic founded on the doctrine of agnosticism
(to use the modern term) which he shared with Hamilton.
Since knowledge of God, in His absolute existence, is self-con-
tradictory, since 'absolute morality' is equally beyond human
knowledge and since our moral conceptions can only be relative
and phenomenal,' he seeks to disallow any criticisms of theological
doctrine which are based upon human conceptions of good and
evil. The indignation with which this doctrine was repudiated by
John Stuart Mill formed one of the most striking, but not one of
the most important, features of his criticism of the philosophy of
Hamilton.
IV. JOHN STUART MILL AND OTHERS
John Stuart Mill is, on the whole, the most interesting and
characteristic figure in English philosophy in the nineteenth
century. He was successively the hope and the leader, sometimes,
also, the despair, of the school of thought which was regarded as
representative of English traditions. He was born in London on
20 May 1806, and was the eldest son of James Mill. He was
educated entirely by his father and was deliberately shielded from
association with other boys of his age. From his earliest years he
was subjected to a rigid system of intellectual discipline. As a
result of this system, knowledge of what are considered the higher
branches of education was acquired by him in childhood, and he
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14
[ch.
Philosophers
started on his career, according to his own account, with an advan-
tage of a quarter of a century over his contemporaries. This
is probably an overstatement of a very remarkable intellectual
precocity; and John Mill recognised, in later life, that his father's
system had the fault of appealing to the intellect only and that
the culture of his practical and emotional life had been neglected,
while his physical health was probably undermined by the strenu-
ous labour exacted from him. James Mill's method seems to
have been designed to make his son's mind a first-rate thinking
machine, so that the boy might become a prophet of the utilitarian
gospel. In this he succeeded. But the interest—one may almost
say, the tragedy—of the son’s life arose from the fact that he
possessed a much finer and subtler nature than his father's—a
mind which could not be entirely satisfied by the hereditary creed.
He remained more or less orthodox, according to the standards of
his school ; but he welcomed light from other quarters, and there
were times when Grote and others feared that he might become
a castaway. 'A new mystic' was Carlyle's judgment upon some
of his early articles. Mill never became a mystic; but he kept an
open mind, and he saw elements of truth in ideas in which the
stricter utilitarians could see nothing at all.
He had no doubts at the outset of his career. On reading
Bentham (this was when he was fifteen or sixteen) the feeling
rushed upon him that all previous moralists were superseded. '
The principle of utility, he says, understood and applied as it was
by Bentham,
gave unity to my conception of things. I now had opinions; a creed, a
doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion;
the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward
purpose of a life.
Soon afterwards he formed a small ‘Utilitarian Society,' and, for
some few years, he was one of 'a little knot of young men who
adopted his father's philosophical and political views 'with youth-
ful fanaticism. ' A position under his father in the India office
had secured him against the misfortune of having to depend on
literary work for his livelihood; and he found that office-work left
him ample leisure for the pursuit of his wider interests.
He was already coming to be looked upon as a leader of
thought when, in his twenty-first year, the mental crisis occurred
which is described in his Autobiography. This crisis was a result
of the severe strain, physical and mental, to which he had been
subjected from his earliest years. He was in a dull state of
6
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Mill's Early Writings
15
nerves'; the objects in life for which he had been trained and for
which he had worked lost their charm; he had ‘no delight in
virtue, or the general good, but also just as little in anything
else'; a constant habit of analysis had dried up the fountains of
feeling within him.
